Agony review

On paper, Agony sounds like a winner. Players take on the role of a wretch flung into the depths of hell for reasons unknown and are tasked with clambering out of the pit. To that end, they need to find a mysterious figure known as the red goddess and endure all manner of horrors in their quest to escape.

Visually, Agony looks pretty good too. Well, it looks disturbing and disgusting for the most part, but it’s a fairly decent representation of hell. Rather than take a post-modernist view of Satan’s realm – like leaving the player in a launderette or a dentist’s office – developers MadMind Studio have gone for a more Hieronymus Bosch interpretation.

Agony’s hell is a dripping, obscene mess, filled with glistening flesh, dripping viscera and jutting bones. Players will come across giant skulls, creepy shadow-flecked skin-grafted walls, quite a few human genitalia and lots and lots of blood. At times it becomes oppressive – especially when the light dims to near-complete darkness and players can’t see exactly what’s going on – but it’s all painstakingly well presented. If only the rest of the game was as good.

Unfortunately it isn’t. In fact, Agony is likely to incense players of traditional horror games since, once they get over the initial shock of the game’s admittedly shocking environment, they’ll find that over time there’s very little to do. For the most part players will find themselves finding body parts to places on pedestals and in bowls of blood, drawing sigils and holding their breath so grotesque demons don’t spot them and tear their spine out. That’s really just about it.

This is made all the more aggravating by poor level design, frustrating mechanics and repetitive gameplay. Some of the levels are presented in an open-ended fashion, possibly to give players the illusion of choice of progression, but really they just make things more confusing. The game’s checkpoint system – represented by a series of mirrors – is equally erratic; sometimes they appear within five minutes of each other and at other times, players can spend up to twenty minutes of slogging through hell before they’re able to save their game. If they die on the way, they risk being flung back to where they were roughly half and hour earlier.

When the player dies they’re given a limited time to possess a nearby host to avoid being sent back to a checkpoint. On the lowest difficulty, players can trigger this ability automatically, but on higher difficulty settings the game doesn’t really explain how to possess someone and since players die an awful lot, this pushes Agony into control-smashing, rage-quitting territory.

It’s a real pity because one can’t help but think that somewhere inside Agony there exists the kernel of a genuinely decent game. As it stands, though, Agony is a walking simulator set in a well-presented (if horrible) environment with a dearth of activities available. It’s not sheer agony to play, but it’s close!

★★☆☆☆